24 June 2009

Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, or CPIT for short is one of the many tertiary education providers in New Zealand. Late last year Strategy took over the CPIT contract and with it a completely new look for CPIT's advertising was made. Two main changes to the logo are changing from Garamond to a San serif typeface what looks like Akzidenz Grotesk bold and the movement and increase emphasis on the 'feathers'.

The change in Advertising is probably where the most significant change in branding can be seen, more text based advertisements using strong bright colours (as below) have been pasted up around the city. Gone are the old posters featuring an image with a half relevant pun on a white background, in comes saturated colour stick figures, pictograms and plenty of type.Colours in above image are similar to CPIT ads not exactly the same as through scanning, converting to web and changing from CMYK to RGB affects colours)

The logo itself is a step in the right direction although the typeface is a bit too bold but an update was needed. The same can be said for the advertising and other Ephemera. I am not sad to see the old ads disappear and I think the creators of them would be happy to forget them too.

2 comments:

The new logo was in some ways and not, a surprise for me. I didn’t think old one didn’t need to be updated, though I did think if it was to be updated, then the move to san-serif was the obvious one.

Goes without saying, using a serif typeface denotes a more serious, formal aesthetic - much suitable for a tertiary institution. San-serif, well, I’m not convinced… kind of looks cheap, but I'm no logo expert yet. I’m sure this re-design was done with the intention of making the CPIT more ‘cool’ and appealing to the younger target group.

The font is very bold, but it matches the stroke weight of the pattern. The logo is actually derived from Maori weaving patterns - so I learnt from Maori Art History last year!

Can’t emphasise how much how I am soo glad to see those ridiculous toaster ads gone!